Spiritual liege

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Yeah, it's kind of like this.

A "liege" is a sovereign to whom one owes fealty. Therefore, a "spiritual liege" would be a person to whom one is ideologically loyal, like a thinker whose philosophy one followed.

This phrase has come to be widely used among fans of Warhammer 40,000 after Matt Ward gave an interview explaining why Codex: Space Marines had so many Ultramarines characters in them: "[t]he Ultramarines are undoubtedly the best Space Marines ever. Yes, really! Thanks to the heritage of Guilliman and their myriad heroic deeds, the Ultramarines are the exemplars of the Space Marines. With a few fringe exceptions... all Space Marine chapters want to be like the Ultramarines and recognize Marneus Calgar as their Spiritual Liege."

Because it makes total sense why they'd venerate the Ultramarines and not their own Chaptermasters and Primarchs.

Since then, "spiritual liege" has been used as an insulting way to refer to Roboute Guilliman, Marneus Calgar, or Matt Ward. It is also used ironically, to make the point that one's spiritual liege is not one of those three. It might also have to do something with the fact that directly speaking the name of Matt Ward within 4chan as a whole is forbidden (If you should ever type "Mat Ward" or "Matthew Ward" in the text box, it'll count your entire post as spam). Thus, /tg/ normally refers to him as their "Spiritual Liege" as a way to talk about Matt Ward.

In the Horus Hersey novels its heavily hinted that what's left of the two lost legions were absorbed into the Ultramarines, meaning that a large number of their successor chapters aren't really Ultramarine but venerate Guilliman over their original primarch. On the other hand, if your alternative is facing down the Space Wolves, you'd pledge anyone, even Abbaddon, as your liege.